Review: 'America's Toughest Jobs'

If you've ever watched Deadliest Catch or Ice Road Truckers and thought, Dang, I wish I could do that, then NBC has the perfect show for you in America's Toughest Jobs.

If, on the other hand, your thought process is more along the lines of, Those shows are great, but you couldn't pay me enough to do work like that, then, well, NBC might be in a little bit of trouble.

That's pretty much the whole idea of America's Toughest Jobs, which premieres Monday: Take a group of people who, for the most part, make their living behind a desk and put them through a series of grueling temp jobs ranging from fishing for crab to drilling for oil and give the person who lasts the longest a big pile of cash.

The show, hosted by actor Josh Temple, is the brainchild of producer Thom Beers, who has made carved out a healthy niche on cable producing shows -- Deadliest Catch, Ice Road Truckers and Ax Men are among his creations -- that celebrate the sort of dangerous, back-breaking work the vast majority of us don't do anymore. The foreign nature of the work is part of the shows' appeal -- but so is relating, or trying to relate, to the men who do that kind of work and wondering if we could hack it.

America's Toughest Jobs essentially takes that question away from us in favor of a competition among greenhorns to see who can last the longest in a series of physical jobs. The show also plays out like a version of Beers' greatest hits -- a little crab-fishing here, some long-haul trucking there, a smidge of timber work thrown in. The dips the series, and consequently the viewer, take into each world are only superficial ones, and they're over in a couple of days.

The 13 contestants are a typical mix of reality-competition types -- the loud-mouthed guy, the model, the enthusiastic youngster and the like -- and there are the usual bits of camera-confessional trash talk and platitudes about how eye-opening the experience has been. What we don't get in the two episodes NBC sent out for review is much sense of why they're here, beyond mundane quotes like "There's more to life than sitting behind a desk." Are they, like most other reality-show participants, in it for the money and camera time, or are some of them really interested in making a career change? It's a question the producers say is central to the show, but it doesn't come up a whole lot early on.

(The show is also a little stingy with even basic background information. Other than the occasional chyron with a contestant's vital statistics, we learn very little about them over the first couple episodes.)

Like all of Beers' shows, America's Toughest Jobs is very well-produced. Sweeping landscape shots and fancy graphics make it one of the prettier unscripted shows to look at, and narration familiar to any Deadliest Catch viewer helps speed things along. And the portions of the show where the contestants are actually performing that week's job can be engaging.

But once the focus shifts back to the game elements and the individual contestants, whatever momentum had built up just evaporates. The hybrid of Beers' own successful formula and the well-worn elimination competition ends up being less than the sum of its parts.
----
America's Toughest Jobs premieres at 9 p.m. ET Monday, Aug. 25.

E-mail

• Digg
• Facebook
• Fark
• Yahoo Buzz
• Stumbleupon